Mirrors my internship experience almost exactly. Three rapid-fire technical interviews that I thought went quite well, then a "sorry, no dice" email. Someone else I know just went through the same thing, also for an internship.
Google sure makes a lot of noise about how they are hiring and competing for talent, but continue to turn away good people for unknown reasons.
I think Google receives around 20000 resumes per day. If you've got that kind of interest (and what I've heard, justified interest) you'll have to turn most people down (ie. >99%). I don't have inside knowledge about the Google hiring process, but with that many people applying, you're bound to have some false negatives.
The problem is that they do the exact same thing for people that they reach out to. Their recruiters go out to mailing lists and linkedin and harvest emails, then contact those people and offer them positions. If you say yes, they start you on the exact same anonymous interview process, the interviewers having no clue that you didn't apply yourself and treating you just like any other generic wannabe. That's why a lot of the best programmers won't take offers from Google, they know they're going to be treated like cattle throughout the whole process by people who have no clue who they are or what they've done and don't really care to know.
It's important to know that googlers are encouraged internally to do interviews (for extra cookie points? I don't know :P), they're assigned randomly to candidates for most of the process, so they're not a part of the whole process, just a piece of the machinery. No one oversees the interviews to make sure questions are not repeated and that there's a logical thread from one to the other (especially the onsite interviews), and you might not even be asked the questions that are actually relevant for the position they're considering you for, when you're in the latter stages of the process.
The stories I've heard from the hiring trenches are all pretty much the same. It's a great company, but their hiring processes are very weird.
They've contacted me twice, 5 years apart for SRE positions, which aren't really a great match to my experience. I've never actually applied.
First time, first phone screen, not that bad. Second interview, they push on bash, and I said, essentially, that I wouldn't use bash, I'd use python. So much for that process.
Second time, same phone screen, same self evaluate, same damn questions on the first part. This time, of course, I know the answers to the tricky questions, because they asked me the same damn questions the last time.
This time though, the process has taken nearly a month for about three calls, including the one actual phone screen. Nothing more for a couple weeks, then the "sorry, not gonna happen, and were not going to tell you why".
I'm a little confused. They call me, looking for something that I'm not a good fit for, again. I do better this time. I'd really like to know if it's me, or if their ai is just that whacked.
From my POV, I felt that the phone interviewers for my internship were chosen arbitrarily (mine were from New York, when I was trying to get a spot in the Mountain view campus).
The reasoning appears to be that you're either good enough or you're not, and that it doesn't matter who interviews you for that to be true. However, the difficulty was really variable: interviewer 1 asked lots and lots of algorithms questions which I wasn't doing well on, caused him to become obviously annoyed with me. 2 seemed fairly ambivalent throughout. 3 really worked with me to try and get answers out of me (even though I was incredibly nervous).
I don't see why phone screens are not with prospective teams; they're the ones that will have to deal with you and have the best idea of what skills they need. Maybe they're trying to avoid people building up little fiefdoms? I generally came out feeling the way you do (and the way the OP does). It seems random, and for a company that (rightly) prides itself on the quality of its data and making data-led decisions, it makes it sting doubly.
The problem is that they do the exact same thing for people that they reach out to.
As someone who does technical interviews for a technology company, your "they"s have two different antecedents.
HR goes through resumes and reaches out to people. Engineering does technical interviews. I my experience, I have seen very low correlation between "HR liked this candidate" and "candidate was good."
A few keywords in your resume will get you reached out to by the vast majority of recruiters. Those same keywords do nothing for the guy asking you to solve a problem on a whiteboard and finding your answer wanting.
Google sure makes a lot of noise about how they are hiring and competing for talent, but continue to turn away good people for unknown reasons.